There was a fascinating article in the Texas Tribune this week about the recent legislation in Texas that, among other things, appears to allow textbook money to be directed toward technology, calls for “open source” textbooks to be authored, and
Online and free ≠ open
Newsweek ran an article this week about online courses. This article provided some publicity for the OER movement…except that the article really wasn’t about OER. The article said, in part, “In addition to YouTube EDU, Web sites like iTunes U,
How “conventional” do open textbooks need to be?
I’m working on some product plans and business models for open textbooks in K-12 and have been thinking a lot about how “textbook-like” they need to be to get broad adoption. A lot of the work in OER is reform-driven,
Education already has a “public option”
Recently, there has been a lot of fed policy activity on open ed, including the introductions of the Durbin open textbook bill and the Foster Open Source Textbook act [sic…open source applies to software, not OER, but we’ll leave that
The equity agenda
I was at a meeting to discuss OER where a very salient point was made. As the group tried to articulate a consensus position on the important principles of using OER, Glen Thomas, the Secretary of Education for California talked